The Rise of the Good Coaster

With every theme park era, as in virtually every commercial industry, comes a new roller coaster fad. The past two decades have seen a large number of high-tech innovations: first came the magnetic launch in the mid nineties. Then the hydraulic launch coasters took the industry by storm. The more-than-vertical drop has had a very commendable streak; more than ten years, although it is fading. Other, less successful ideas have captured interest briefly but failed to really catch fire: the 4th Dimension roller coaster, the pneumatic launch and the latest craze; the wing coaster. But over the last five years a new ‘design’ has emerged. Simply put, it involves building really, really good coasters. It seems insane that such an obvious business plan would be such a recent development, but it’s perfectly true. Throughout the second half of the 20th century wooden coasters were old hat; they’d reached the end of their evolutionary ability and it seemed couldn’t be built any bigger, faster or better. Steel was the new wood, and over the decades leading up to the new millennium the leading ride designers and parks aimed for innovation: the first loops, the first suspended and inverted coasters, the first coasters to top 200ft and the like. The focus was very much on pushing the limits of physics and materials and hoping that this would provide sufficient thrills.

This era really came to an end with the end of the ‘Coaster Wars’; a period where the USA’s two biggest chains, Six Flags and Cedar Fair, constantly vied for superiority through one-upmanship. In the end the two chains effectively tied; by 2005 both had a monstrous 400ft+ and 120mph+ launched roller coaster that did little more than launch you up and drop you down again (interestingly neither chain really won, they’re both very popular still; Six Flags spread their huge installations across two parks, Great Adventure and Magic Mountain, whilst Cedar Fair really only concentrated on their flagship park, Cedar Point. As a result Six Flags as a chain is doing a little better whilst Cedar Point is considered to be the best of the three parks individually). But it was what the parks did next that was most interesting.

The tide started to turn with the emergence of B&M and Intamin in the 90s, and the short-lived success of Custom Coasters International. Custom Coasters built wooden coasters exclusively; the rides weren’t particularly huge, but they focused on designs providing an incredible range of forces on the rider and manufactured them to an unprecedented level of precision. Their rides, which include Megafobia (Oakwood, Wales), Tonnerre de Zeus (Parc Asterix, France) and Boulder Dash (Lake Compounce, Connecticut) were phenomenally well received, topping many ‘best of’ lists, and despite the company going bankrupt in the early noughties they’re still considered some of the best rides around today.

B&M put a similar precedent on high quality manufacturing. They’ve come up with some of their own hugely successful ideas; the inverted coaster and the dive machine, and also perfected others, the stand up and the flying coaster. B&M continue to push the envelope in terms of creativity and glossy smooth ride experience. But this hasn’t necessarily been a good thing; a lot of B&Ms are heavily criticised for being too smooth, forceless and devoid of airtime. I agree they are hit and miss; for example Shambhala (PortAventura, Spain) is unanimously labelled as one of Europe’s finest steel coasters, but a similarly new ride, GateKeeper, at Cedar Point, has been massively spurned by the enthusiast community for being boring in almost every aspect. For a while it was rumoured that they refused to do certain things; there were claims they’d never build a ride over 230ft tall because of their support design (they now have four rides that exceed this height) and have only just announced their first launched ride, Thunderbird at Holiday World, for 2015 (originally it was reported this delay was because of the general unreliability of launch systems and the company’s emphasis on reliable rides, but they have now openly stated they’re willing to build one for any customer who asks). This seems limiting, but it’s clear you don’t need either of these things to build a great ride, plus their lack of manoeuvrability is evidently not true anymore. But the problems remain; they haven’t really pushed the roller coaster boundaries, but because of their incredible reliability and low maintenance requirements they have been the dominant force over the last five years or so (and one of the two dominant forces of the last twenty years).

Shambhala (White) and Dragon Khan (Red) are two hugely popular B&M coasters, but not all carry such high regard

Enter Intamin. Intamin began as a bit of a second rate company back in the 80s. They built some fairly lowly stand up coasters and a couple of bog-standard wooden rides, spending a decade under the radar. It was a fad that launched them (no pun intended) into the big time; electromagnetic launch systems. From nowhere they built the two tallest, fastest roller coasters in the world; Superman the Escape (Six Flags Magic Mountain, California) and Tower of Terror (Dreamworld, Australia), putting them firmly on the thrill ride map. But their next step took them closer to roller coaster Olympia. Arrow Dynamics, a legendary US based firm, had built the first rides to exceed 200ft; rides know as Hypercoasters, with swooping drops, huge hills and out-of-your seat bunny hops. They were no-nonsense attractions, although some were a little boring and/or rough. B&M had a go building their own, Shambhala being one of the most recent examples, but despite a lot of them being pretty good, none of them have ever been considered really outstanding. Intamin on the other hand nailed it in one go; the secret to their success is the unbelievable amount of negative g-force (‘airtime’; that floating ‘butterflies’ sensation you get in your stomach) they deliver. Over five years they built seven of them, with Bizarro (Six Flags New England, Massachusetts) and Expedition GeForce (Holiday Park, Germany) being often regarded as the two best steel coasters on the planet. For some reason the design’s popularity waned; possibly because of Intamin’s following fad, the hugely successful hydraulic launch coaster (of which both of those aforementioned 400ft+ coasters are).

I mentioned earlier that after Six Flags and Cedar Fair built their colossal stratacoasters (the term for rides over 400ft tall) they changed tune a little; and they both did it via Intamin. Next Six Flags built El Toro, a wooden roller coaster that uses a special track manufacturing technique to provide unheralded smoothness. Most wooden coasters are constructed from the ground up on site; once the structural scaffold is in place, layered strips of wood are laid and glued onto the track and finally a thin strip of metal placed on top for the wheels to run on. This is costly, timely and usually introduces considerable human error. There is a peculiar empirical rule that you can’t build a regular wooden roller coaster over 150ft; many have tried it, and eventually they all just become unbearably rough and costly to maintain; effectively they self destruct (See Son of Beast, Mean Streak, Rattler and seemingly, now, The Voyage). Intamin’s technique involves manufacturing the track at the factory using high precision lasers, cutting it up and snapping it all together like a giant toy set (and like all steel roller coasters) on site. This allows for much bigger rides with much more adventurous layouts to be built. El Toro is, right now, the best roller coaster in the world (the very best wooden rides are generally considered better than the very best steel) and its closest wooden competitor is another Intamin ‘Prefabricated’ woodie; T-Express (Everland, South Korea) which is very much inspired by it. Bizarrely, and I can imagine only due to cost or reliability, their popularity has also faded. Only four have ever been built, T-Express being the most recent in 2008.

Wood has, in fact, experienced an even more recent revolution than Intamin’s prefab, and the American company Rocky Mountain Construction is completely responsible. RMC actually started life as coaster constructor; ie. they would assemble the rides built by other companies (interestingly they were responsible for putting together El Toro). As a result no one in the enthusiast community had actually heard of them, that is until they announced their first original creation for 2011. The success of many businesses relies on a unique competency: something that they can provide that no other business can, and RMC perfected this from the start. They would take old wooden coasters, strip the track from the structure, and replace it with steel. This steel track could be much more ambitious, by the very virtue of it being steel. Many parks installed massive wooden coasters between the seventies and the nineties, and although they were popular at the time many of them are now extremely uncomfortable, expensive to maintain, devoid of thrills compared to modern counterparts and cover huge amounts of valuable real estate. RMC’s remedy revitalises an old attraction by effectively replacing it with an attractive steel upgrade. But then they took a courageous step and doubled their product line: not only would they convert old wooden coasters, but now, like Intamin, they would solve the problem of building woodies over 150ft tall without them imploding. Their method involves using a much larger metal strip than traditional woodies; the rail is about two thirds wood and one third steel rather than just a thin metal strip over a large stack of wood. This has led to people claiming that they’re steel coasters rather than wood, but it’s a pointless debate since there’s no official definition. Either way, these new hybrids have been fantastically well received.

This takes us up to the present era; Intamin’s top steel Hypercoasters and wooden Prefabs topping virtually all the rankings, as they have done for over a decade, with RMC’s new bunch rapidly ascending. But the majority of big rides recently constructed are still predominantly uninspired B&Ms, cheaper stock models from companies like Gerstlauer (the pioneer of the beyond vertical drop) and similar fads. Take Merlin, the operator of Alton Towers and Thorpe Park, for example. Merlin’s Chief Executive Nick Varney is known for his insistence on only building rides with a ‘Unique Selling Point’; a way of making the ride easily marketable. The scheme has obvious short term benefits; you can pull in guests easily when the ride first opens. But in my opinion it’s a short sighted quick fix. The reason Alton Towers became so popular in the first place was because it built world class rides like Nemesis and Oblivion, and its more recent additions, Rita, Thirteen and the Smiler (which I admit is a good coaster) have been less enthusiastically received. Thirteen may have pulled in a lot of guests in its opening season, but once they’ve ridden it there’s simply no chance they’ll have any interest in doing so again. In fact, such was the marketing hype around it that once people had ridden it they were so annoyed at its mediocrity that they explicitly didn’t want to ride it again. This is clearly not the case with Nemesis; I’m still more than willing to make the three hour pilgrimage every other year to get on England’s best roller coaster. And that’s just the thing: the numbers are exciting, the unquantifiable marketing (ie. Thirteen supposedly being the most disturbing coaster in the world) is interesting initially, but what really sets rides apart is just how good they are. Thorpe Park expanded massively between 1998 and 2012, installing seven flat rides and five huge roller coasters, but none of them are particular outstanding. They’re all good rides, on paper it’s a great line up, but when it comes down to it none of them are worth more than a couple of trips to the park (Ok, yes, I have been to Thorpe twenty times now, but that’s not the case for normal human beings) and as a result the park is now really suffering in terms of attendance.

Thorpe Park's Swarm is a perfect example of a much-too-smooth B&M coaster. It looks fantastic, but it just feels a little flat

But the current trend seems to show that Merlin is the odd one out, and being a UK resident I really hope they notice what the international parks are doing. Cedar Point’s follow up to the coaster wars was 2007’s Maverick, an Intamin launch coaster. I remember the announcement of the ride; I was desperately anticipating the world’s tallest or the world’s fastest or whatever, and when I found out that at 105ft tall it would only be a quarter of the height of their previous installation I was disappointed. But I was a foolish 12 year old. The ride is not built purely around its launch; it integrates it into the mix and makes it far more than a fad. It has inversions, a beyond vertical drop, high speed turns and airtime hills, and as none of them are the focal point they blend up to make a perfect roller coaster smoothie. The ride is now Cedar Point’s most popular ride, a park which is home to 17 roller coasters, 4 of which are taller than 200ft. This breed of inverting, creative, airtime-focused launch coasters has really taken off, and the world is all the better for it. Another couple of Intamin rides, iSpeed (Mirabilandia, Italy) and Cheetah Hunt (Busch Gardens, Tampa) followed and long time family-ride builder Mack, from Germany, also tried their hand. They pulled it off at the first attempt with Blue Fire (built at Europa Park, one of Europe’s best parks and owned by Mack; they showcase all of their ride prototypes there). There are four more exact copies of Blue Fire that are either open or opening within the next two years, and although it is a little disappointing to see parks simply order the exact same model from Mack (they do it because they don’t have to pay for a new track layout to be engineered), at least the rides they are building are being built solely because they’re fantastic. The one current Mack launch coaster that doesn’t feature the same design is Helix (Liseberg, Sweden) which opened this summer, and was the original inspiration for this article. Liseberg is a very popular but quite constricted park in Gothenburg. It’s built in the city centre and also on a hill, so it has a tough time fitting in rides. It is in fact already home to one world class coaster, Balder, one of the four Intamin Prefab woodies, and a ride that when it first opened was voted the best coaster in the World. This was very openly their aim with Helix too; they wanted to build a ride that would be considered one the best on the planet. I can’t reiterate it enough; I think it’s the best marketing possible. I myself visited the park this summer to ride it (and Balder), and bear in mind there are still plenty of parks in the UK full of stock rides that I haven’t been to.

Liseberg has an old Swedish rival, Grona Lund, which is to Stockholm what it is to Gothenburg. In fact Grona Lund is even more compact, rides are literally built one of top of the other to save space, and as a result there’s not much it can to do to answer Helix’s threat. Luckily the park is part of a chain, Scandinavian Parks and Resorts, and so instead they plan to retaliate at one of their other parks. They have opted to build a new ride at...their zoo. The Zoo, Kolmarden, is currently home to one tiny kiddie coaster, but as of 2016 it will also be home to one of the largest wooden roller coasters in the world, Wildfire. And it will be built, you guessed it, by Rocky Mountain Construction. Now this is a real coaster war. I love watching roller coaster press releases; I still get as giddy as I did when I was ten years old, and Wildfire’s was no exception. The advert was typically full of fire, CGI renderings and an intimidating voice. But the thing that caught my attention the most? The tagline: “The greatest wooden roller coaster in the world.” It’s a pretty ballsy statement, but I have a sneaking suspicion it might be true.